Part 2 – How Neocons Push for War by Cooking the Books By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Part 2 – How Neocons Push for War by Cooking the Books

An
1898 cartoon features newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William
Randolph Hearst dressed as a cartoon character of the day, a satire of
their papers’ role in drumming up U.S. public opinion for war by Leon
Barritt

Most Americans outside of Washington policy circles don’t
know about Team B, where it came from or what it did, nor are they aware
of its roots in the Fourth International, the Trotskyist branch of the
Communist International.
Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress
and assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985 attributed the
intelligence failure represented by 9/11 to Team B and had this to say
about it in a 2004 article for the Los Angeles Times.

“The roots of the problem go back to May
6, 1976, when the director of Central Intelligence, George H.W. Bush,
created the first Team B… The concept of a ‘competitive analysis’ of the
data done by an alternative team had been opposed by William Colby,
Bush’s predecessor as CIA director and a career professional… Although
the Team B report contained little factual data it was enthusiastically
received by conservative groups such as the Committee on the Present
Danger. But the report turned out to be grossly inaccurate… Team B was
right about one thing. The CIA estimate was indeed flawed. But it was
flawed in the other direction.”

Korb went on to explain that a 1978 Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence review concluded; “that the selection of Team B members had
yielded a flawed composition of political views and biases. And a 1989
review concluded that the Soviet threat had been ‘substantially
overestimated’ in the CIA’s annual intelligence estimates… Still, the
failure of Team B in 1976 did not deter the hard-liners from challenging
the CIA’s judgments for the next three decades.”
Now long forgotten, the origins of the Team B “problem” actually
stretched back to the radical political views and biases of James
Burnham, his association with the Communist Revolutionary Leon
Trotsky and the creation of powerful eastern establishment ad hoc
groups; the Committee on the Present Danger and the American Security Council.
From the outset of the Cold War in the late 1940s an odd coalition of
ex-Trotskyist radicals and right wing business associations had lobbied
heavily for big military budgets, advanced weapons systems and
aggressive action to confront Soviet Communism.
Vietnam was intended to prove the brilliance of their theories, but as described by author Fred Kaplan,

“Vietnam brought out the dark side of
nearly everyone inside America’s national security machine. And it
exposed something seamy and disturbing about the very enterprise of the
defense intellectuals. It revealed that the concept of force underlying
all their formulations and scenarios was an abstraction, practically
useless as a guide to action.” (Wizards of Armageddon page. 336)

Kaplan ends by writing “The disillusionment for some became nearly
total.” Vietnam represented more than just a strategic defeat for
America’s defense intellectuals; it represented a conceptual failure
in the half-century battle to contain Soviet-style Communism but for
Team B, that disillusionment represented the opportunity of a lifetime.Trotskyist Intellectuals become The New York Intellectuals become Defense Intellectuals
Populated by an inbred class of former Trotskyist intellectuals, the
Team B approach represented a radical transformation of America’s
national security bureaucracy into a new kind of elitist cult. In the
1960s Robert McNamara’s numbers and statistics justified bad policy
decisions; now personal agendas and ethnic grudges would turn American
foreign policy into an ideological crusade. Today those in control of
that crusade fight desperately to maintain their grip, but only by
de-encrypting the evolution of this secret “double government” can anyone understand America’s unrelenting post-Vietnam drift into despotism over the last 40 years.

Rooted in what can only be described as cult thinking, the Team B experiment
tore down what was left of the CIA’s pre-Vietnam professional
objectivity by subjecting it to politicization. Earlier in the decade,
the CIA’s Office of Strategic Research (OSR) had been pressured by Nixon and Kissinger
to corrupt their analysis to justify increased defense spending but the
Team B’s ideological focus and partisan makeup so exaggerated the
threat, the process could never return to normal.
The campaign was driven by the Russophobic neoconservative cabal
which included Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pipes, Richard Perle and a
handful of old anti-Soviet hardliners like Paul Nitze and General Danny
Graham. It began with a 1974 article in the Wall Street Journal by the
famed nuclear strategist and former Trotskyist Albert Wohlstetter
decrying America’s supposed nuclear vulnerability. It ended 2 years
later with a ritualistic bloodletting at the CIA, signaling that
ideology and not fact-based analysis had gained an exclusive hold on
America’s bureaucracy.
The ideology referred to as Neoconservatism can claim many godfathers if not godmothers. Roberta Wohlstetter’s reputation
as one of RAND’s preeminent Cold Warriors was equal to her husband’s.
The couple’s infamous parties at their Santa Monica home acted as a kind
of initiation rite for the rising class of “defense intellectual”. But
the title of founding-father might best be applied to James Burnham. A convert from Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s inner circle, Burnham’s 1941, The Managerial Revolution and 1943’s The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom championed the anti-democratic takeover then occurring in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy while in1945’s Lenin’s Heir he switched his admiration, if only tongue in cheek, from Trotsky to Stalin.
George Orwell criticized Burnham’s cynical elitist vision in his 1946 essay Second Thoughts on James Burnham, writing “What Burnham is mainly concerned to show [in The Machiavellians]
is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can
see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the
power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud… Power can
sometimes be won and maintained without violence, but never without
fraud.”